Jeff Sessions fights for his old Senate seat in Alabama runoff

WASHINGTON — Alabama Republicans are voting Tuesday to determine the political future of Jeff Sessions, settling a primary contest for the Senate seat that was upended by President Donald Trump's backing of former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville.

Sessions held the Senate seat for 20 years, but left it to serve as attorney general under Trump, a move that made sense after Sessions was the first senator to back Trump's presidential bid. The relationship between Trump and Sessions soured when the attorney general wouldn't intervene in the investigation into Trump's campaign dealings with Russia.

Trump endorsed Tuberville in March and has repeatedly attacked Sessions on Twitter, urging Alabamians not to send his former attorney general back to Washington.

Polls have consistently shown Sessions trailing Tuberville, 65, an Arkansas native who has never held elected office before.

The winner of Tuesday's runoff will take on Sen. Doug Jones, the most vulnerable Senate Democrat, in November. Jones won his seat in 2017 in a special election to replace Sessions after Trump tapped him to be his first attorney general.

Sessions was forced out as attorney general after months of public anger from Trump over his decision to recuse himself from the investigation conducted by Robert Mueller into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 campaign — a move the president never forgave him for.

Since Sessions announced he was running for the Senate seat, he has spent much of his time trying to convince his former constituents that despite Trump's repeated attacks against him — from calling him "slime" to "not mentally qualified" to "the biggest mistake" of his presidency — he can still be trusted to defend the president.

Political strategists say that Tuberville's outsider status and his time as head football coach at Auburn could help carry him to a win on Tuesday.

"The outsider is now who has the upper hand in every race these days," said David Mowery, a political strategist based in Montgomery who has worked for both Republicans and Democrats. "It's hard to turn that into a negative in 2020 Republican primaries."

Tuberville is also remembered "fondly from a time when Auburn football was successful," said David Hughes, a political science professor at Auburn University at Montgomery, "and people in the South really do take SEC football seriously."

Sessions and Tuberville entered the runoff after neither won a majority in the March 3 primary, with Tuberville leading with 33.4 percent of the vote and Sessions coming in second at 31.6 percent. The runoff was initially scheduled for March 31 but was delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, prolonging the race by more than three months.

Grace Newcombe, a spokesperson for the Alabama secretary of state, said that they had seen a "significant increase in absentee ballots for a runoff election" due to the coronavirus pandemic but they did not expect a delay in reporting the results Tuesday.

"We hope to have all counties reporting before midnight," Newcombe said.